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Monday, October 30, 2017

Theology, Metaphor, and the Expansiveness of God

I
appreciate very much Eugene Peterson’s comments on the way the Apostle Paul
uses metaphor.

He writes,

Mystery, for Paul, is
not what is left over after we have done our best to reason things out. It is inherent in the very nature of God and
his works.

God and his operations
cannot be reduced to what we are capable of explaining and reproducing.

The way Paul uses
language in his writing is to load it with metaphor. There is hardly a paragraph he writes that
lacks a metaphor. … Instead of pinning down
meaning, metaphor lets it loose. Metaphor does not so much define or label; it
expands, forcing the mind into
participating action. … [Metaphor forces] the imagination into action to find meaning at another level, engaging the
imagination to look for relationships and resonances that tell us more than anything
literal. We cannot be passive before a
metaphor; we imagine and enter into. Metaphor
enlists us in believing-obeying participation. … Paul uses words not to define,
but to evoke.

Paul’s language is a
living energy field. He doesn’t develop
a technical jargon for the sake of being precise about God. … He uses language like a poet. A living faith requires this lively,
participatory language. … Paul’s theological imagination enabled him to keep
the soaring truths and beauties of the gospel of Jesus Christ accessible and
understandable to the very people that gather still in our congregations.

Theology comes alive
in conversations and prayers. … Theology
is not talking about God but living in community with persons in relationships,
who, like Paul live in communities whose names they know.

Paul brings people by
name into his theology, making sure we will not conceive theology as something
impersonal, something to think about and argue over without living it.[i]

I typed some of the phrases above
from Peterson’s writing in italics because I wanted to emphasize the expansive
nature of what Peterson wrote, which in turns calls attention to the expansive
nature of Paul’s theology. My brother is
an Oxford-trained theologian. I often
pick his brain, trying to understand what new things need to be written and
thought in terms of theology. Hasn’t it
all been covered? Isn’t theological
writing done today just a rehashing and a reworking of what’s been said
previously in the two millennia of Christianity’s existence? Hasn’t it all been said before?

Not the way Peterson presents
it. If theology is ever expanding
(because the God theology seeks is beyond human words and comprehension, but
also is willing to reveal God’s self to unprepared human minds), then theology
will never “know it all.” The lively,
participatory nature of metaphor is not only necessary for theological
understanding; metaphor itself is fueled by God’s very nature. In other words, we need to metaphor to
understand God and ourselves and ourselves in relation to God and one another,
and metaphor exists because of who God is.

I don’t know if Peterson’s
understanding of metaphor and the expansiveness of God gets as the heart of
theology as my brother understands it.
But I do know what Peterson has written helps me see what my brother has
insisted – that theology is necessary, ongoing work. It is the work of scholars. It is also the place where the church comes
alive. It is where the rubber meets the
road when the church exists in the world as a community “in Christ.”